Rating Movies: Tony Laplume vs Grumpy Bulldog (2019-2020 Edition)

These are back-to-back, but Laplume actually did them weeks apart and just with the A to Z Challenge and stuff I could do them on back-to-back blogging days.  Anyway, this one isn't all that long.  I don't think Laplume did as many and about half of them I hadn't seen.  Like I said in the last entry, between all the new streaming options and Pluto TV and generally not wanting to waste time and money going to movie theaters, I watched fewer newer movies.  Even some of the big franchise ones I didn't watch because I didn't care.  So here's what's left!

Joker (Laplume)

rating: *****

review: Opinions range from brilliant to apathy, depending on how invested the viewer is in the legacy of the character.  The stairway sequence alone makes the results iconic, and Joaquin Phoenix a worthy successor to Heath Ledger.

Me:

Trying to find a review is really difficult and I'm not sure if I really did one.  Anyway, it was OK for what it was.  It's basically something more akin to Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy than a superhero movie.  There is a forced reference to Bruce Wayne and the death of his parents.  Mostly if you hadn't called it Joker it would be a fairly cliché movie about a loser who inadvertently becomes a hero to the masses by going against the system. (3/5)

Star Wars - Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker (Laplume)

rating: ****

review: At this point you were either onboard with the sequels or had already dismissed them.  I found the conclusion of Rey's journey, her relationship with Kylo Ren, to be perfect, a response and the antithesis to how things played out in the original trilogy (and even the prequels), daring to believe in hope in a most cynical age.

Me:

Rise of Skywalker:  It tried hard to clean up after its predecessor and Make Star Wars Epic Again, but does it with needless plot complications:  Chewie "dying," C3-PO not being able to translate Sith to them, and that whole dagger thing in general.  Trying to give Rey an epic destiny and bring in a new Big Bad just makes things more of a mess.  A well-intentioned mess but hardly a satisfactory conclusion. (2/5)

Terminator: Dark Fate (Laplume)

rating: ****

review: Ever since the second one, this franchise has been hellbent at sabotaging itself. Dark Fate was the rare instance of everyone sort of agreeing to trust the results. I've generally enjoyed every film, but this one was a cut above.

Me:

Dark Fate:  Maybe you'd consider it ironic or something like that that bringing James Cameron back to the franchise didn't really help.  Of course Cameron was only one of like 20 people involved in the story and "produced" it, which I imagine him sitting in a chair counting his money like Gus Van Zant in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back.  The other irony is people didn't like the third movie, so...let's pretty much do the same thing as the third movie only worse.  So...we still have Judgment Day only now SkyNet is "Legion" and since John Connor is killed in 1998, there's some Mexican girl named Dani who's going to lead the resistance.  And we have a Terminator sent to kill her that's part liquid metal with an old-school Terminator underneath--just like the third movie!  Though it's like a Transformers Pretender in that the outer "shell" and inner robot can completely separate to create two attackers.  This time instead of a normal human or a Terminator to protect John Dani, we have an "Augmented" woman from the future to defend the girl.  Plus there's a geriatric Sarah Connor to provide life lessons like put your phone in a potato chip bag so the government (or Terminators) can't track you.  It's kind of funny that in this future you have robots who cover themselves with flesh and humans who implant themselves with metal--so we're kinda meeting in the middle to where if both sides didn't kill each other they might become indistinguishable. (2/5)

The Lighthouse (Laplume)

rating: ****

review: Robert Pattinson has been keen to find oddball projects, and this was perhaps his most successful at getting the mainstream to notice.  Personally I need to watch it a few more times, since I find his performance to be unusually showy, but I guess others didn't.

Me:

Another where I can't find a review I wrote here so maybe I just said something on Facebook.  Anyway, it's kind of slow but you're always wondering where it's going to go.  Like The Shining or similar movies it's really about how isolation causes these two guys to slowly go mad and of course they end up taking it out on each other. (4/5)

The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot (Laplume)

rating: ****

review: The movie with the most ridiculous title ever is absolutely worth experiencing, especially the tense first half, which leads to getting to just spend time with Sam Elliott, since the actual climax isn't worth as much.

Me:

The Man Who Killed Hitler & Then the Bigfoot:  From the title this movie wants you to think it's weird and maybe fun.  It's not really either of those things.  I mean it's not early Tim Burton or David Lynch or Richard Kelly weird.  The core of the story is pretty good, even if a lot of it is cribbed from Legends of the Fall, a favorite of my late sister and probably some other movies.  Sam Elliott is an old man who left his sweetheart to join the army in WWII and went undercover to kill Hitler--at least A Hitler; the implication being there were multiples.  Which makes sense when you consider how other despots like Saddam Hussein had a double (or more) to serve as decoys.  By the time he gets back, his sweetheart is dead.  Years later, he's recruited by the governments of the US and Canada to kill a Bigfoot creature that's poisoning all life in an area.  And he does so, obviously.  And then it just kind of peters out.  The Bigfoot part really seems to serve little purpose.  I mean does it redeem him for losing his sweetheart?  No.  (We don't really know how she died let alone whether he could have saved her or anything.)  Does it bring him fame or glory?  No, it's a secret mission.  Does it help him connect with anyone at all?  Not really, though he does later go see his brother.  So other than adding some zing to the title, it doesn't contribute much.  Earlier the young him gets a shave from a mystic Russian, who cuts him with the razor and says he will succeed in his mission (killing Hitler) but will be cursed the rest of his days.  So maybe him not dying and killing Bigfoot was to show how he's cursed or something.  I would have liked something more conclusive. (2.5/5) (To explain my Legends of the Fall reference, in that movie Brad Pitt and his younger brother join the army in WWI and when the younger brother is killed, Brad Pitt slaughters a bunch of Germans and then spends years traveling the world, unable to live with the guilt.  By the time he gets home, the girl he loves has married his older brother, Aidan Quinn.  Some of this was parodied on an episode of Archer with his valet Woodhouse in the Brad Pitt role.)

Captain Marvel (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: Nothing wrong with it, except there's no way it can validate the hero's claim to icon status, which is the one thing it really needed to do.

Me:

Captain Marvel:  This might be higher (or lower) if I'd seen it more than once.  Marvel had ample chances to be the first one to do a big female superhero movie, but they didn't come up with this until after DC's much better Wonder Woman.  It's too little, too late, much like the forced "girl power" scene in Endgame.  And turning Nick Fury losing his eye into a joke was pretty lame after 11 years of movies. (2.5/5)

The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: Can't really compete with the poignant twist at the end of the first one.

Me:

Ugh, another I apparently didn't write an entry here for?  Like a lot of sequels it isn't as good as the first part.  I completely agree with Laplume that this couldn't match that poignant twist between father and son in the first movie.  So this time it tries to have a twist featuring the boy and his sister.  But that doesn't even ring true in my experience; my sisters never wanted to play Transformers & GI Joe with me and my brother and we never wanted to play Barbie or My Little Pony with them.  Maybe that's because there were two of us and two of them?  If it's just one and one maybe there's more incentive to cross the gender line?

Anyway, they throw more stuff at you but not really better stuff. (2.5/5)

Dark Phoenix (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: Kind of ironic that the end of the Fox franchise proper circles back to the point everyone thought killed it in the first place.

Me:

I wrote a long review comparing the comic book story and the movie so I'll just kind of summarize.

Like this year's Shazam Fury of the Gods, the movie was basically knee-capped by its own studio when the Fox-Disney deal put an end to the Fox X-Men universe.  What's the point of a franchise movie when everyone knows the franchise is dead?  From my long review:

The book is better on the whole, but the movie has its moments.  A few.  It's definitely not a great movie but it's not Wolverine Origins bad at least.  And a little less stupid than Apocalypse was.  I mean you don't have Jean and Magneto putting a house together like it's made of Legos.  And Magneto only kills a few people, not thousands.  So that's something.

On its own the movie has the same problem as a lot of the X-Men franchise in squandering some of its characters.  Storm and Nightcrawler really have no character development; the former just does weathery stuff and the latter mostly is a teleporting taxi service.  The Cyclops-Jean love story that had years and years to build on in the comics feels rushed and hollow in the movie.  And Xavier's kind of a dick most of the time.  What happened to Moira Taggart?  Were they still a thing?  Maybe that's why he's such a dick.

Anyway, it wasn't great and it wasn't terrible.  As essentially the end of the franchise it's kinda going out with a whimper. (2.5/5)

Avengers: Endgame (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: I was thoroughly underwhelmed by the whole Thanos experience.  They just didn't know what to do with him, so fittingly, he's barely in this one.  This is the definition of the MCU's villain problem.

Me:

You can read my long, grumpy review; this is more of a summary from my ranking the Meh-CU entry:

Avengers:  Endgame:  But now we have to fall back on that deus ex machina of time travel to fix things because otherwise how could we?  Another long, dreary slog with the forced death of Iron Man and the even more forced departure of Steve Rogers.  Some people have probably seen it fifty times by now, but once in the theater was enough for me.  And that was largely to avoid spoilers. (2/5)

Alita: Battle Angel (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: Nothing wrong with this one except it feels like small potatoes compared to most of the other things from the year.

Me:

Alita: Battle Angel:  A couple of people in a Facebook group said this was good so I watched this on HBO.  It was pretty good, but the android looks so fake with those big weird eyes and stuff.  I know they did that to make it more like the manga version, probably because of all the people who bitched about Ghost in the Shell, but it just looked weird, worse than that Robert Zemeckis stuff in Polar Express, Beowulf, etc.  Anyway, there was plenty of decent action and Christoph Walz is good as Alita's "father" while fellow Oscar winners Jennifer Connelly and Mahershala Ali cash a paycheck as the bad guys.  With a fourth Oscar winner in James Cameron writing/producing there was a lot of talent ultimately wasted on a movie that didn't do great box office, but especially if you have HBO (or maybe a free Redbox rental) then it's worth a watch. (3/5)

Shazam! (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: As it turns out, if people keep saying your movies are too grim, it's not the appropriate response to make a movie that features a kid in the body of an adult.  The results aren't bad, but keeping them disconnected from everything else is definitely the wrong move.

Me:

Shazam:  Like Deadpool, this was as much a comedy as an action movie.  A lot of it is basically like if in Big the kid had turned into Superman instead of Tom Hanks.  It took a character most people hadn't cared about since the 50s and made it a success. (3.5/5)

Gemini Man (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: I have a full review with a much different rating (I'm pretty sure), but this one's more accurate to relative results.  I guess I really would rather watch Men in Black without Will Smith than two Will Smiths.  This is '00s Smith rewarmed.  He'd already moved past this kind of material.

Me:

Again I can't find a review I wrote here but I know I watched it.  I would agree with Laplume in that this was kind of a throwback for Will Smith.  I guess trying to recapture the magic of Independence Day and Men in Black back in the 90s with kind of an old-school sci-fi action movie.  The twist was there were two Smiths, one his present (at the time) age and a younger clone or whatever.  I think in the end it was a serviceable movie but not really great and any progress it might have made for Smith's career was washed away by the infamous Oscars slap. (2.5/5)

Spider-Man: Far From Home (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: I just wasn't a fan of the MCU Spider-Man, until he was joined by the other Spider-Men in No Way Home (which like Far needlessly belabored the title of the first one).

Me:  

This would probably be lower if not for the cookie scene with J Jonah Jameson--played by JK Simmons even!  Between that and actually making Peter and MJ's relationship more like Peter and MJ's traditional relationship it felt more like a Spider-Man movie even with the globetrotting.  Mysterio was actually a better hero than villain, but the callbacks to Civil War and Iron Man were neat--the latter featuring Ralphie from A Christmas Story!  Still not as good as the first two Raimi movies. (3/5)

Hellboy (Laplume)

rating: **

review: I was never the biggest fan of the original films.  This one is a marked step down from them.

Me:

I don't know how so many movies didn't get written about on this blog.  This is another one.  Sad.  This was another of those where they tried to be more faithful to the comics than the previous movie but it didn't really make it better.  Overall I agree with Laplume, though I might say at best it was a step sideways. 

Here was my comment on Facebook: Like The Amazing Spider-Man it's OK but doesn't really feel like an improvement over the original unless you really like gore and gross stuff.

(2.5/5)

Midsommer  (Laplume)

rating: **

review: Florence Pugh is the golden child of critics these days (she also starred in Fighting with My Family, which is probably the only reason it was taken seriously by them).  And mostly, I just don't get it.  This was one of her breakout movies.  I found it needlessly impressionistic.  Because it's really just one of those weird movies that desperately wants to be profound but isn't.  The exact opposite of the movie at the top of this

Me:

Midsommar:  This is one from last year that for some reason people, including critics, seemed to love but I found it so, soooo boring and predictable.  The main character is a girl who spends most of the movie ugly crying because her sister committed suicide and killed their parents.  She tags along with her boyfriend and his friends to a village in Sweden that has a creepy festival.  If you've ever seen Wicker Man--either the original 70s one with the Equalizer guy or the 2000s version with Nic Cage--then you already know pretty much what's going to happen.  It just takes a long, long time to get to that point. (1/5)

2020 Movies!

Reading Laplume's capsule entry of the first pandemic year, I realized I had only watched a paltry 6 of them.  So I figure I might as well just post them here.  A lot of this is of course because so many movies got postponed with theaters closed during the pandemic.  Marvel pretty much sat out the year and the final James Bond movie starring Daniel Craig got bumped to 2021.  Meanwhile Star Wars was only on TV that year, so not a lot of big franchises.  Anyway, here we go!

WW84 (Laplume)

rating: ****

review: Everyone went gaga over the first one, but I instantly preferred this one, which was a better overall showcase for Wonder Woman, and had a memorable villain or two besides.  The opening sequence alone is a classic, and I guess I'm a sucker for ones showcasing someone in a cathartic flying experience, since I loved that best about Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, too.

Me: 

WW84:  Only after a meme on Twitter told me I could use my regular HBO login to watch HBO Max did I get around to watching this.  And...I didn't really like it.  The core concept didn't work for me.  I mean in superhero movies magic is one thing, but a wishing stone?  And Maxwell Lord (basically a cut-rate Donald Trump) wishes to be the stone?  That's like that old thing where you get a magic lamp and wish for more wishes.  And it's 1984 but no one ever takes a picture of Wonder Woman?  Granted they didn't have cell phone cameras, but people had regular cameras and Polaroids.  Shouldn't there be at least blurry Bigfoot/Nessie-type pictures?  And wouldn't Bruce Wayne and maybe Clark Kent and Arthur Curry remember when Wonder Woman saved the world?  And she flies now? (She flies now.)  She wishes Steve Trevor to live again and he Quantum Leaps into some other dude?  Considering he died in 1917 how is it he could fly a jet in almost no time?  And when did Wonder Woman start trying to make things invisible?  And why the hell isn't she flying and making shit invisible in BvS or Justice League?  

"Cheetah" wound up being pretty lame.  The nerdy person who obsesses over the hero and turns on him/her was already done in Batman Forever and Amazing Spider-Man 2.  And just because she wore leopard print she turns into a cat woman?  Maybe if I had watched it in a theater I would have liked it more by virtue of being a captive audience but watching it at home I just started playing games on my phone and not really giving a shit.

I really liked the first movie but it was more down-to-earth.  The scene where she crossed No Man's Land gave me the chills; this just gave me the yawns.  I'm wondering if Patty Jenkins isn't like Zack Snyder in that she shouldn't be given too much creative control or she'll make a mess; doesn't give me any hope for her Star Wars movie or a sequel to this. (2/5)

Capone (Laplume)

rating: ****

review: I can think of very few actors who without the benefit of some scandal have garnered such undeserved scorn from critics as Tom Hardy.  For anyone else this would've been hailed as a genius showcase.

Me:

Rightly or wrongly Josh Trank took most of the heat for the dumpster fire that was Fant4stic.  Now he's back with this trippy look at Al Capone's last year.  I'm not really sure what the point was except for us to see what a pathetic state he was in after dementia and strokes.  I like Tom Hardy but since they didn't do a lot of flashbacks to Capone's younger days, why not just hire an older actor instead of doing fake-looking prosthetic makeup?  Anyway, it's OK but one glad I got "free" on Amazon. (2/5)

Sonic the Hedgehog (Laplume)

rating: ****

review: The hedgehog is entertaining, but for me it's a hugely welcome spotlight and return to form for Jim Carrey after years of exile.

Me: 

Another I can't find a review of on here so I probably wrote it on Facebook.  Anyway, I liked this movie a lot more than I thought I would.  I never really played the video games since I didn't have a Sega so I was not really a target audience.  Still, it really shook off the video game movie jinx by managing to be fun and yet poignant, like a Pixar movie only mostly live action.  Jim Carrey hams it up but in a movie like this it was OK. (3.5/5)

Bloodshot (Laplume)

rating: ****

review: An attempt at jumpstarting a new cinematic superhero universe for most viewers, even before the pandemic, was instead a nonstarter, with Guy Pearce gamely trying to rub off whatever remaining Memento magic he had on Vin Diesel.  But Vin Diesel never really has fans outside of the Fast & Furious movies, alas, even if he makes decent action movies out of the concepts driving them.

Me:

I can't find a review of this either but I remember watching it and thinking it was not that great.  The start of it makes it seem like one thing but then there's a twist.  Overall it wasn't that good. (2/5)

The New Mutants (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: Holds the dubious distinction of being the last of the Fox productions of X-Men movies, with a troubled release date history that no doubt benefited from the pandemic for finally happening.  Not a bad movie by any means, but its existence in a vacuum is disappointing given how most of the other films in the franchise went out of their way to provide some tangible link to the rest of it, usually with a throwaway cameo or two.

Me:

The New Mutants:  This movie got kneecapped twice by circumstances beyond its control.  First there was the Fox-Disney merger that essentially made this a lame duck franchise movie like Dark Phoenix.  And then there came the pandemic that delayed the release until 2020 and even then it was only when theaters started opening so it had almost no chance of being a success.

Eventually the movie came to Disney+ and much, much later I remembered I'd put it on my watchlist.  Overall for what it is, it's not bad.  It's a pretty small movie in that it's pretty much all in one old religious school or hospital or whatever it used to be.  Five teenagers are under the "care" of a Dr. Reyes, who is supposed to be helping them control their powers.  Maisie Williams of Game of Thrones turns into a wolf (I think), Anya Taylor-Joy of The Northman can enter a limbo world she created with a neat sword and stuff, Charlie Heaton of Stranger Things can launch kinetic energy, another dude can turn to fire (yawn), and then Dani Moonstar (Blu Hunt of...not much) is the new girl whose power is unknown and starts messing with everyone, including her.  There's a little lesbian making out and some OK CGI action and stuff.  Mostly if this had been given the budget of a big movie and not cut down by circumstances, it could have been built up more instead of running only about 90 minutes.  And not surprisingly there are no credit scenes. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  Dr. Reyes is played by Alice Braga who was in The Suicide Squad.)

Fatman (Laplume)

rating: **

review: Mel Gibson has been pumping out b-movies.  They're not all terrible.  In fact he's made some brilliant choices!  But this Santa Claus thriller ain't necessarily one of 'em.

Me:

Fatman:  I probably could have watched this last year on Amazon Prime, but this year it's free with commercials on Peacock.  If you're a fan of Terry Pratchett's Discworld the premise is similar to his holiday novel Hogfather in that an assassin is hired to kill Santa.  But in this case it's more of a straight-ahead action movie instead of a clever light drama.  A rich boy who got a lump of coal in his stocking calls up the hitman he has on speed dial to hire him to kill Santa.  Like in Hogfather, the assassin has actually been toying with this idea and is willing to take a crack at it for real.  In this case he drives to Alaska to track down the old fat man--Mel Gibson--who to stay afloat has leased his elves to the government to make parts for a fictitious jet fighter. (In today's world, making drones would probably be more appropriate.)  And so then there's a showdown and all that.  It was amusing even if Pratchett's version is better. (3/5)

Some disagreements there.  And some not.  Huzzah.  If Laplume ever does 2021 I think there'd be more than 2020 by virtue of the Marvel movies and last James Bond and probably some other ones.

Rating Movies: Tony Laplume vs Grumpy Bulldog (2018 Edition)

I did entries comparing Tony Laplume's capsule reviews for 2014-2017 to my reviews, sort of as an ad hoc Siskel & Ebert.  Then he did 2018 and I almost didn't do it because there were quite a few that I hadn't seen.  I think by 2018 you started to get more streaming options with things like CBS All Access (now Paramount+) and HBO Go/Now (soon to just be Max) joining Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon.  Plus Disney was starting to pull up stakes on Netflix and other services to create Disney+.  So with all these new options adding original content and dispersing new movies to different places, it made it harder to keep up with things except for the biggest movies.  As well, late in 2017 I started watching Pluto TV a lot, mostly the Rifftrax and MST3K channels and Laplume would never watch those movies because Mr. WWE Fan is too good for bad movies. [eye roll]

I did decide to compare those I remembered seeing but then the problem was about 1/3 of those I couldn't find where I'd actually written a review.  I figure either I didn't write anything or I just did something on Facebook and good luck trying to track that down now.  So I just scribbled something based on my best recollections.

Now on to the show!

Isle of Dogs (Laplume)

rating: *****

review: The movie that definitively made me appreciate Wes Anderson, his second stop-motion animated flick, about a nightmare scenario striking a Japanese city which exiles all its dogs to "Trash Island," and the courageous dogs (and humans!) who struggle to save the day.  Packed with Anderson's trademark ability to collect great stars to his projects, including what's now my favorite Bryan Cranston performance as Chief, the unlikely leader of this pack.  The whole film is amazing, including a perfect soundtrack.

Me:  

Isle of Dogs:  To my knowledge this is Wes Anderson's second stop-motion movie after The Fantastic Mr. Fox about 8 years ago.  This is about a Japanese city in the near-future that banishes all dogs to an island of garbage because of a dog flu.  One of the dogs is the son of the mayor's dog so the kid goes to the island to find him.  A group of dogs finds the kid and helps him traverse the island.  Like most everything Anderson does it's kinda weird but it has heart.  I mean at the core it's basically a story of a boy and a cur becoming friends.  Just the stop-motion and weirdness like most human lines being only in Japanese (only sometimes with translation) might throw people.  Though it's on a Japanese island it features mostly white people doing the voices:  Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Frances McDormand, Jeff Goldblum, and long-time Wes Anderson alum Bill Murray.  Does that count as cultural appropriation?  (3/5)

Solo: A Star Wars Story (Laplume)

rating: ****

review: For most Star Wars fans, my opinions are the exact opposite of mainstream opinion.  Just recently, I thought Rogue One was basically an abomination, and the sequels were brilliant.  And I loved Solo, exactly what the character Han Solo needed to solidify his legacy, including an extremely clever interpretation of the old Kessel run record he bragged about in his first appearance.  If ever Star Wars truly became more than just the Skywalker saga (sorry, Mandalorian fans), this is what it looks like when Han takes center stage, and exactly how it ought.

Me:  

I didn’t watch this until after I got Disney+ in 2020 and then just thought it was meh.  Not really a necessary addition to the Star Wars mythos.  Lando perving on a droid was especially not something we needed to see or even contemplate.  Ick.  And Han’s surname is the result of a shitty dad joke:  He’s Han and he’s solo, get it?  Ugh.  Han is probably the least interesting or important character in his own origin story.  The Q’ira and Darth Maul scene could have set up another movie but since this flopped (in part because of post-Last Jedi backlash and in part because of its troubled production history) they did that in the comics instead. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact: you can still get the action figures from this and the last two sequel movies for pretty cheap on Amazon or at discount stores.)

Super Troopers 2 (Laplume)

rating: ****

review: I didn't really get into the Broken Lizard boys until Club Dread, so the first Super Troopers had for a long time been a comedy milestone for other movie fans.  I was more than ready for this late sequel, however, especially thanks to all the Canadian humor infused into the shenanigans.

Me:  

Super Troopers 2:  This was one of those movies Kickstartered--or actually it was some other site that was the same deal--by fans and released for a few weeks in theaters.  Because Disney moved Avengers 3 back a week it ended up coming out a week before that and thus being obliterated.  Which might be just as well.  Most of it is just a bunch of moldy cliches about Canadians and/or French Canadians as the doofus cops from the first movie are brought out of being fired as city cops to patrol a part of Canada being annexed into the US.  The funniest parts were when they dress up as Mounties and mess with people on the road and "the Fred Savage Incident" that's referenced but not shown until the credits.  (And the gag reel during the credits.)  If you haven't seen it, you're probably better off. (2/5)

Gringo (Laplume)

rating: ****

review: A classic ensemble farce lampooning corporate nonsense.  Another movie that demands a much wider and acclaimed reputation.  This year was full of 'em.

Me: 

Gringo:  This Amazon movie from 2018 is about an African guy who goes to work as a middle-manager for a Chicago company.  One of his biggest jobs is going down to Mexico to check up on things down there.  Learning his job is about to be cut and his wife (Thandiwe Newton) is having an affair, the guy decides to fake a kidnapping to get the company to pay him.  Except the company doesn't have a kidnapping insurance policy anymore, so to save money, the CEO (Joel Edgerton) sends his brother (Sharlto Copley) down to Mexico to extract the guy.  There are a lot of twists and double-crosses and things like that.  If you like those early Guy Ritchie movies like Snatch or Revolver then you'd like this because it's the same blend of violence and dark humor. (3/5) (Fun Facts:  For some reason Charlize Theron plays a bitchy, slutty executive; it just seems like she could have done something better.  Nash Edgerton directed this so you have Australians starring in and directing a movie about an American company employing an African guy to go to Mexico.  It's a small world after all.)

Tag (Laplume)

rating: ****

review: Famously the movie that broke Jeremy Renner's arms (he's had some terrible luck, okay?) and limiting his resulting chances to be featured heavily in the later Avengers movies (but was that really ever going to happen?), but well worth it.  A classic comedy.

Me:  

Tag:  Based on a true story there's a group of guys who for one month of year play an epic game of tag.  They get in disguise and stuff to tag each other, but they've never tagged their friend Jerry (Jeremy Renner) who is getting married.  So they all go home for the wedding hoping to tag him, but he won't make it easy.  It was amusing but a little long.  In the credits they show the real guys this was based on and some of the stuff they did was better than the movie.  One guy dressed up in a bulldog mascot costume so he could tag another guy at a basketball game.  That would have been cool in the movie.  Also during the credits Jeremy Renner with the other guys as backup sings the old Crash Test Dummies song Mmmm Mmmm Mmmm--however you'd spell it. (2.5/5)

Sorry to Bother You (Laplume)

rating: ****

review: LaKeith Stanfield had a breakthrough year (he also had a small but striking supporting role in The Girl in Spider's Web), headlined by this wicked satire.

Me: 

 I know I watched this but I can’t find a review.  I liked it up to a point.  Where it starts getting into turning people into centaurs (or something like that) it goes a bit too far for me. (3.0/5)

Ant-Man and the Wasp (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: Paul Rudd is such a great hand, it's easy to forget why he's generally not really considered a leading man.  This is even more obvious in the recent third installment, but in this second one, there's plenty of assisting parts, including an upgrade so Marvel could claim it used its female characters better than its record had really stated by this point. 

Me:  

Ant-Man and the Wasp:  A Marvel sequel that is fun and mostly focused on its own little corner of the MCU, though the cookie scene does have a huge impact on Endgame.  Bringing back Hope's mother was something I was surprised they didn't do the first time, but I guess they wanted to spend more time setting up that quantum realm thing.  And adding another old Batman movie alum to the MCU with Michelle Pfeiffer!  Ghost is less forgettable than most Marvel villains and in this case not even really a villain so much as someone trying to save herself.  (3.0/5)  

Mission: Impossible - Fallout (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: Ah!  Right!  The infamous Henry Cavill role that produced the mustache!  Tom Cruise had developed a nasty habit in this series to curb the wider appeal of any potential usurpers (Jeremy Renner, previous victim, Ghost Protocol), and Cavill's best scene, preparing for a fight in a restroom, showcased in the trailers, is relegated to much less impressive results in the film itself, and of course a reveal as one of the bad guys.  But I really do love this series.

Me:

This is another one I know I watched but I can’t find a review.  Anyway, if you asked me to differentiate this one from the previous 2 movies, I would find that a Mission: Impossible.  Just like if you asked me to identify which woman was in which movie as Tom Cruise’s side piece (or even his wife from the third one), I would also have no idea.  And at this point if you ask me what this movie was about, also no idea.  But Henry Cavill has a mustache!  That was the most memorable thing. And Tom Cruise does some crazy stunt--again.  (2.0/5)

Avengers: Infinity War (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: Elsewhere on this blog you can see where my original thoughts were considerably more positive, but hindsight places the best sequence, and the only one I really think fondly about, in Steve Rogers' dramatic comeback.  Otherwise, dramatically underscores all the failings of the MCU to be anything more than throwaway entertainment.  

Me:  

You can read my full, super-grumpy review here.  Or here’s my shortened version from my ranking entry, “Avengers: Infinity War:  A long, dreary slog that's largely devoid of plot logic.  I went through all that in my grumpy review of it.  I mean, why not just use the Time Stone and go back to kill Thanos?  Or at least keep him from from getting all the stones?”  I mean since they used time travel to fix things anyway, right?  No, we can’t time travel then but we can time travel later. [eye roll] (2/5)

Venom (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: Hey, I'll follow Tom Hardy anywhere!  Typically great performance.  Rest of the film around him...well, it's there, anyway.

Me:  I can’t find a review but I mostly liked this.  I didn’t have very high expectations for a Venom movie that couldn’t have any Spider-Man elements in it but they made it work well enough.  Indie movie darling Michelle Williams is largely wasted as the love interest--except when she briefly gets to be Venom--while the bad guy was a pretty decent Elon Musk-type asshole rich guy.  I still haven’t seen the sequel to see what they did with Carnage.

Here's my comment on Facebook: This was surprisingly not bad. This version of Venom is obviously an improvement over Spider-Man 3. I like how they give the symbiote some personality, one that sort of mirrors his host.

(3.0/5)

Aquaman (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: I just haven't really gotten around to revisiting it.  I love Jason Momoa's Aquaman.  But he doesn't feel as electric as he does in (either cut of) Justice League, here.  Role of a lifetime all the same.

Me:  Aquaman:  The first movie after the disaster of Justice League and it did a good job of changing the narrative by largely ignoring Justice League, ditching the grim-n-gritty Snyder tone, and taking its cues from Black Panther and Thor.  The end result is a decent popcorn movie on par with a lot of Marvel efforts. (3.0/5)

Deadpool 2/Once Upon a Deadpool (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: The novelty of Ryan Reynolds getting to have the first one made overlooks that the results are seriously obnoxious, without anything around the performance remotely capable of or interested in balancing it out.  This second one has Zazie Beetz as Domino.  It's pretty much enough.

Me:  

Deadpool 2:  It's OK, but not as good as the first one.  It does one of those annoying sequel things by killing off the girlfriend in the first 20 minutes.  Then at least they make fun of that in the credits, so at least they recognize it's kind of lame.  The "X-Force" thing is kind of a fake out.  I'm sure there are some fans who are really annoyed about how Shatterstar and some of the others are used.  Josh Brolin's Cable is OK but in the comics I guess he has a lot of other powers and stuff.  The funniest parts were actually in the mid-credits scenes.  Who would you trust less with a time travel device than Deadpool?  If you haven't watched it yet, there's no end credits scene.  I'm just saying. (2.5/5)

Tomb Raider (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: Goodness, Alicia Vikander deserves a far larger legacy than she ended up getting.  This take on Lara Croft is far more credible than its two cinematic predecessors, and not just because it's based on later entries in the game series that grounded our hero more in the real world.  Last year's Uncharted shows where this one really fell short of the mark: besides Vikander, there's not much else to see.

Me:  

Tomb Raider:  I've never played the video games and I only watched the Angelina Jolie movies once maybe.  Like Pacific Rim [Uprising], this was OK but didn't really feel all that epic or fun like the previous movies, Indiana Jones, or even National Treasure.  I guess to pad the run time it starts out with a pointless kickboxing scene and then some extreme bike riding.  Simon Pegg's frequent cohort Nick Frost shows up in a cameo as a pawn shop owner who gives Lara Croft money to go to Southeast Asia and get a boat to a mysterious island.  It's funny how the boat captain she barely knows is like instantly ready to lay down his life for her.  I guess she's attractive, but I wouldn't sacrifice myself for her in like ten minutes--at least not without getting some first. (Oink, oink.)  Anyway, eventually she has to stop a bad guy from unleashing one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.  I'm not sure if there will be a sequel or not.  Maybe they can put more effort into the script. (2.5/5)

Black Panther (Laplume)

rating: **

review: I still don't get why the character of Black Panther itself isn't considered hugely embarrassing, but it seems a sizable portion of both black and white audiences prefer a fantastical vision of Africa, and an African hero, to represent the best hopes of black people in America, than anything else.  In any other setting, this would work much better.  As the most famous and successful black superhero (at least at the movies), I just don't get it.  Might still end up the most enduring artifact of the MCU era.  If so, its legacy should grow accordingly.  As part of the MCU, it's just ridiculous.

Me:  

Black Panther:  The first Marvel movie that actually had any social relevance.  Until then they all revolved around white males, many of whom with superpowers.  The only two black heroes, War Machine and Falcon, were sidekicks.  Like with female superheroes, Marvel got shown up by DC and so finally did what they could have done years ago.  And while the plot largely follows the traditional Marvel formula, it introduces us to the whole new world of Wakanda that seems like an alien planet even though it's on Earth.  Killmonger is one of the better Marvel "villains," a villain who is in a way a hero as he wants to right the wrongs done to black people over the centuries.  In the era of Trump and police shooting black kids routinely, who can blame him?  There's also some fun and humor provided thanks to the banter between T'Challa and Shuri and the hapless CIA agent played by Martin Freeman.  Andy Serkis chews a bit too much scenery, but overall it's definitely one of the best MCU films. (3.5/5)

Robin Hood (Laplume)

rating: **

review: A fun update but decidedly a lower register than the Kevin Costner and Russell Crowe versions that preceded it.  I mean, is Taron Egerton ever going to be considered to portray a father figure to Superman???

Me:  Another I can’t find a review of but I know I watched it and thought it was better if you think of it as a superhero story vs. a Robin Hood story.  But better than the Ridley Scott one and at least Taron Egerton can speak with an English accent. (2.5/5)

Death Wish (Laplume)

rating: **

review: Bruce Willis's last shot at a mainstream hit is a remake that doesn't really know how to spotlight him.

Me:  

Death Wish (2017):  This is a remake of the 1974 Charles Bronson movie that pretty much started the whole NRA revenge fetish porn industry.  In that movie Bronson's character was an architect whose wife is followed home from the store by goofy punks led by a young Jeff Goldblum.  In this version Bruce Willis is a doctor (lol) who goes out to dinner with his family one night.  The valet gets the location of his house from his car's navigation system (good thing I'm too poor to valet) and gives the location to some crooks, who then break in when the family isn't supposed to be at home but the wife and daughter are.  The wife is killed and the daughter put into a coma.  So after the cops come up with zip, Bruce Willis gets a gun to play vigilante.  Unlike the 1974 version he actually finds the right people to get revenge.  Willis gives a B+ effort while Vincent D'Onofrio cashes a paycheck as the brother who never really contributes anything and Dean Norris basically reheats Hank from Breaking Bad.  While this tries to be socially relevant by taking place in Chicago, which has had a lot of gun violence the last couple of years,   the problem is since 1974 this formula has been used time and again in a variety of ways like Robocop, Darkman, The Crow, Chance of a Lifetime--oh wait that's just in my head.  Anyway, so unlike 1974 this feels pretty generic. (2/5) (Fun Fact:  Elizabeth Shue is Bruce Willis's wife in the movie, so her and Vincent D'Onofrio have an Adventures in Babysitting reunion.  That movie took place in Toronto-as-Chicago about 30 years ago.)

Annihilation (Laplume)

rating: **

review: Much buzzed about, but mostly a wasted cast in a movie of total nonsense.

Me:  

Annihilation:  Like the director's previous Ex Machina, this is a sci-fi movie that is not extremely action-packed, but is tense, gorgeous, and hard to pin down.  (And both feature Oscar Isaac--bonus!)  Basically a meteor or something hits a part of the southern coast by a lighthouse and starts mutating all the life in the area:  grass, trees, animals, and even people!  Natalie Portman's husband Oscar Isaac (so yes, Star Wars nerds, Padme Amidala hooked up with Poe Dameron!) was part of an expedition to explore "the shimmer" and disappeared.  Until he comes stumbling home with amnesia and then passes out.  So she agrees to join 4 other women to explore the Shimmer.  The place is just crazy with all the mutated stuff.  And naturally the people are not immune either.  Anyway, if you're more a fan of sci-fi like 2001 or Solaris than Star Wars or Transformers (Michael Bay version) then you'll probably like this.  And I guess if you're a fan of women in movies who aren't taking off their tops or wearing skimpy costumes.  (4/5)

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Laplume)

rating: **

review: Great animation (of the kind later put to equally stellar work in The Mitchells vs. the Machines), but otherwise lost in spastic storytelling.

Me:  

Into the Spider-Verse:  This movie combined two comic book storylines:  the Spider-Verse story by Dan Slott and the Ultimate Spider-Man reboot introducing Miles Morales by Brian Michael Bendis.  The movie focuses on Miles, who is bitten by a spider and gains most of Spidey's powers and some new ones.  When the original Spider-Man dies, Miles is left to try to find a way to save the world--until he meets an older, out-of-shape Peter Parker from another world.  And then he finds out his new friend Gwen is a Spider-Girl or Spider-Woman or whatever.  And then Spider-Ham, Spider-Man Noir, and some weird Japanese anime Spider-Man thing show up from other universes.  Since this was animated, it had a lot more freedom creatively than the live action movies.  So it could finally give us a big screen Spider-Ham, plus the others, plus Kingpin, and a gender-swapped Doc Ock!  The end result is a brilliant movie, whether you're a fan of Spider-Man or not. (3.5/5)

Bumblebee (Laplume)

rating: **

review: A lot of viewers thought this one corrected the mistakes of the Michael Bay era.  But the results are basically exactly the same as the Michael Bay era.  But without the Michael Bay magic.  So...

Me: 

Bumblebee:  A Force Awakens-type movie as it largely follows the formula of the 2007 movie of a boy girl and his her robot car.  It simplifies the plot a lot more than the 4 previous movies on this list.  The robot designs also looked a lot better, with most of the existing characters on Cybertron actually looking like their G1 versions.  The new characters looked pretty good too.  I was disappointed that I couldn't find a toy version of the one that turned into a Harrier jump jet and another that turned into an F4 Phantom fighter plane.  The former they only seem to make in car mode and I don't know about the other.  The thing I didn't like about most of this movie were the almost constant music cues reminding us it was the 80s.  I mean, really, I got it the first time; I don't need you to drum it into my head 100 more times! (3.0/5) (Fun Fact:  They did eventually sorta make the two figures I wanted, but they screwed up both planes so neither looks accurate.  I did get the Harrier one on clearance, but the fake F4 just looked stupid.  How hard is it to Google planes, Hasbro?!) 

Ready Player One (Laplume)

rating: **

review: Modern Spielberg is desperate to please, and here's his shot at adapting a popular book.  It's not Harry Potter.

Me:  

It's not that the movie was bad; it just wasn't as good [as the book].  The book goes a lot more into this world.  And there are a lot more 70s/80s references than 90s/2000s/2010s ones.  As I said in an entry a few months ago, this was a mistake because the "gunters" were supposed to be so obsessed with the creator that they completely immersed themselves in everything he was into back in the early days of video games.  There was also a lot more in the book about Wade's home situation and his parents and also him going to online school and such.

I'd say to read the book if you really want the full experience or just watch the movie if you don't care. (2.5/5)

The Hurricane Heist (Laplume)

rating: *

review: My first viewing suggested a surprisingly amateurish experience.  Wanted to be kind of like the Fast & Furious films.  Fell well short of the mark.

Me:  I’m pretty sure I watched this but I can’t find a review.  Basically I think it was a cheap straight-to-streaming movie that was OK for its 90-ish minutes but not really great for a heist movie. (2.0/5)

I think at least this time we had more disagreements about these.  That always makes it more interesting than if we agree on everything.

Friday we tackle 2019 AND 2020!

Popularity is Often More Important Than the Truth

Last March my doctor wanted me to get a colonoscopy.  Really, really wanted me to get one because the doctor he wanted me to see was leaving the office.  Which I didn't think was that important since basically anyone there could do the procedure; it is pretty common.  Anyway, a couple of days later, I'm at work and check my email and there's one from the colonoscopy place saying I'm scheduled to get it done in 4 days.  And here's the lengthy list of instructions...some of which need to be done more than 4 days in advance.

I was pretty confused and angry.  So when someone from the doctor's office called, I verbally tore a few strips off her hide, ending with, "Next time use your damned brain."  How dare they schedule what is basically a surgical procedure behind my back!  Especially one with all these complicated dietary restrictions and things I have to do before I can do it.  To borrow from Sean Bean in Lord of the Rings, "One does not simply walk into the doctor's office and get a colonoscopy." 

(Now this is the part where someone says, "I do this stuff all the time and it's totally cool" or some variation thereof to say directly or insinuate that I'm overreacting.)

The excuses for this conduct were, "We were only trying to help" and "If you don't like it, you can change it."  Which to change it you have to call someone in a call center who barely speaks English.  That's a lot of fun.  Thanks for that.  As for the first one, the analogy I decided to finally go with is it's like when a dog or cat leaves a dead animal for you.  To them it's a present, but to you it's just a disgusting nuisance. 

To get to my main point though, the problem is of course the doctor's office will circle the wagons on this and keep mewling their stupid excuses and I'll be seen as the bully because I got upset about it.  Whereas I think they're unethical morons who ought to be fired for breaching my trust and right to self-determination.  As in, I'll be the one who decides when (and if) these things happen, not you.  Trying to force my hand by scheduling something behind my back is unethical and really, really not cool.

What it made me think of is there are two sides in any argument and more often than not, who feels they're right (and often who's seen as right) is based more on popularity than actual truth.  There is that saying, "History is written by the victors."  What that means is the side that wins a war gets to write the history books afterwards.  Our history books would look a lot different if the Nazis had won WWII or the Confederates had won the Civil War--or at least in states outside the South.

And nowhere is this more true than the Internet.  Like back in the 90s on the Transformers message board there was a case where I was very clearly right about something--I even had visual evidence of it.  But people wouldn't agree with me solely because they didn't like me.  So they hemmed and hawwed and tried to poke holes in what was obvious.  And in the end the truth proved beyond a doubt that I was right.  Not that anyone would apologize to me.

It's why I left a Discord group of other authors.  I disagreed with someone else but I knew she was more popular, so any argument I made would be shouted down.  Just like anything I suggested for the group project was shouted down.  There was no point arguing about it, so I figured I'd just save some aggravation and leave.

And of course on this here blog we had the Andrew Leon Debacle(TM) where some people chose what to believe solely on who they liked better.  It didn't matter what arguments I made or how I tried to reason with them; they were "friends" with him so that was it.

This is why in a nutshell bogus conspiracy theories like anti-vaxxers, Flat Earthers, election deniers, and Covid deniers can continue to remain viable even in the face of all evidence.  People just decide something, find a bunch of like-minded people, and then circle the wagons.  When the government or scientists or just normal people try to argue, they twist themselves into pretzels to continue denying what should be pretty obvious.  And especially with the Internet they have this built-in support group to keep making them feel they're right when they aren't.

It's also why gaslighting works so well.  If one person is so confident in his/her beliefs and the other person less so, that less confident person can be convinced about all sorts of things that may not really be true.  Add in some "negging" to lessen someone's confidence and it becomes easier.

And that is why most arguments end up being pretty pointless.  Most people will just stick to whatever point of view.  When that is shared by others, that seems to vindicate them and so they continue thinking they are right, even if it's pretty obvious that they aren't.  And if you're only one man, it's pretty hard to penetrate that circle of wagons.

Does that mean you should just give up?  Probably.  At least give up on those people.

I Rewatched the First Couple of Seasons of the Original Transformers Show & Have Some Thoughts

 Since today is when the latest probably godawful Transformers movie comes out, I thought I'd post some thoughts I had from rewatching the original show on Pluto TV in the last week.  Pluto TV has a separate Transformers channel but mostly they had been showing 21st Century shows like Animated, Armada, Cybertron, Energon, and Robots in Disguise.  Finally they started showing the original series and when my brother mentioned it, I tuned in.  Unfortunately, as they usually do, they didn't show the whole thing.  They stopped sometime in season 2 and then just looped around.  So I brought it up On Demand, which was actually better in that there are a lot fewer commercials.  Anyway, here are some thoughts:

• While better than 60s & 70s animation, it was still kinda bad at times.  There were a lot of mistakes with the coloring, especially with characters who had the same basic design like Starscream, Skywarp, and Thundercracker.  Sometimes there would be just a totally illogical gaffe like the Autobot Sideswipe standing next to Megatron in Decepticon headquarters.  A few second-season episodes looked like they had been outsourced to Dic with cruder drawings and different colorings.  One funny verbal gaffe near the end of the second season is when Jazz says they attacked the "Optimus Prime Memorial" when Optimus is standing right there, alive and well; maybe it was a hint at his fate in the movie?  
• Where did the Protectobots come from? It was also funny that while the combiner groups the Constructicons, Stunticons, Aerialbots, and Combaticons all got a spotlight episode or two with an origin story, the Protectobots just suddenly appear in the last few episodes.  How they got there and where they came from, well...scene missing.  I'm sure part of it was they didn't have a lot of episodes left, but it was disappointing to me because I liked the Protectobots.  I actually have a knockoff set of the originals I got from Wish and a set of the Hasbro ones that came out a few years ago.
• A few episodes would probably get canceled now.  Since it was still the 80s, the show wasn't always culturally sensitive when featuring settings in the Middle East, Africa, South America, or Asia.  And of course most of the ethnic characters were probably voiced by white people because they weren't going to spend tons of money on having actors from every ethnicity.  I'm an old white guy so I shrug it off, but someone who is easily triggered might get set off.
• Other episodes really didn't age well.  Episodes like "Make Tracks," "Blaster's Blues," and "Auto Bop" really don't age well with their references to 80s music and culture.  I'm not sure if it helps or hurts they didn't have the money to license real songs so they just use instrumentals.
• Vic Caroli is an unsung hero.  Most fans talk about Peter Cullen as Optimus Prime or the many voices of Frank Welker or Michael Bell or Casey Kasem.  But rewatching the episodes, what really stuck out for me is Vic Caroli as the narrator.  His voice is deep and resonant but also a bit creepy.  It's like if you mixed Keith David and Vincent Price's voices.  And almost 40 years later I can still hear him saying, "It is the year 2005..."
• As always, the best episodes focus on characters.  While there were some epic episodes like the "Ultimate Doom" trilogy, for me the best episodes are the ones that focus on a character--or characters--like "Fire in the Sky" that focuses on Skyfire's origin or "The Master Builder" that focuses on Grapple.  It's part of why I've loved them all these years, along with the stories in their file cards.  There are also other great ones like "The Secret of Omega Supreme," "Search for Alpha Trion," and "War Dawn" that give us insights and tragic backgrounds for some of the characters, making them more relatable.  This is what has largely been missing from the Bay movies--and probably this latest one.

And going into season 3:

• Perhaps the problem is not with Rodimus Prime but in ourselves.  I was thinking about why we almost all hated Rodimus Prime so much that they had to bring Optimus Prime back.  I was thinking part of the problem was with us, the viewers.  In late 1986 I was 8-9 years old, since my birthday is in November.  A lot of viewers were probably about the same age.  We simply couldn't appreciate what the writers were trying to do with Rodimus, which was to have a flawed character learning and growing into the role of leader.  Optimus Prime was so strong, wise, brave, and noble, basically what every little kid wants in a parent figure.  He's basically perfect.  Especially then we were too young and immature to appreciate someone who has to struggle to know and do the right thing.  Though really Rodimus was far more like ourselves than Optimus.  And let's face it, most of us could aspire to be Optimus but we'd never make it; I'm sure far more of us are like Rodimus, questioning ourselves and what the right thing is.  A lot of this might also be why it took so long for a lot of Trek fans to appreciate Picard as much or more than Kirk, because he wasn't that strong cowboy-type; he was a lot more subtle and that's a lot harder to appreciate, especially when you're young.

Anyway, those are my random thoughts on it.

Insecure Wednesday: Creating a New Author Was Harder Than I Thought

 I mentioned a while back I was in a Discord group with some other similar authors for a few weeks.  In that time, one harped on me for my covers and having a male pseudonym and said that feminization stories sold better than the gender swap stories I usually wrote.

And since Eric Filler sales had been pretty flat (or down) for some time, I decided to try creating a new name.  This name would be more unisex and focus on feminization instead of full gender swaps and be transgender romance instead of erotica.  They would also have better covers, A+ content, and other stuff I didn't do when I started with the Eric Filler books back in 2014.  This new name would have all the benefits of what I had learned in 8 years.  So it should be better than ever, right?

Nope.  It was pretty much a failure.  I started writing stories near the end of November and published the first one called Spokesmodel on December 11th.  Annnnnd...nothing.  Pretty much no sales, no pages read or anything.

Well, fine, maybe I just needed to do another one to get more notice.  The second one I did was called Misstek Syrens.  The misspellings were intentional because it's the name of a band who turn out to be Sirens like in The Odyssey.  Anyway, I published that one probably close to the end of the year and...nothing.

I wrote a third story called My Tutor and by then I decided since no one had read Misstek Syrens and it was pretty short, I'd unpublish it on Amazon and make it my reader magnet on Prolific Works.  I also used "Tiny Letter," which is a stripped-down newsletter thing from Mailchimp I've seen other authors use, to create a newsletter.

So when I published My Tutor I had the newsletter ad in that book and Spokesmodel.  I also had an author page on Amazon's Author Central.  I had to email them to get that set up because even though you can have like 10 pen names in Author Central, the system wouldn't let ME do it myself for...reasons.  Anyway, so now we've got a couple of books and a newsletter and a reader magnet.  Things should be ramping up, right?  Nope.  Still nothing.  I did a newsletter but it only went to my email because no one had signed up!

I did a fourth book called Body Builder and didn't even bother with a newsletter because still no one had signed up.  I had already tested it once so there was no need to do another test.

As I started the next book, Secret Identity, I decided to do something more desperate and put Eric Filler as a co-author.  The idea being that maybe then I could promote it to Eric Filler readers and some of them might sign up for the newsletter and buy other books and maybe I could start get something going.

Annnnd...not really.  I got like 2 sales and some pages read, but only 1 newsletter signup.  So still no traction on this thing.

Then I decided to write one more story called Ransom Wear.  That way I'd have 5 stories so then I could do a bundle.  And if none of that got any traction for Kelly Counts, I'd just pull the plug.  Still nothing happened, so I was ready to close it out with the bundle.

A couple of weeks later I released the bundle.  And got a couple of sales, but still not really anything great.  So I won't be doing any more of those.  Since the bundle was long enough I tried to do a paperback.  But the problem was it kept bouncing it back with some dumb boilerplate blathering about DVDs and CDs and ISBN numbers previously used.  Which it's not a set of DVDs or CDs and Amazon assigned the ISBN to me.  After the third time I emailed them and some helpful chap in India told me that you can't use the word "Bundle" in paperbacks.  (Kindle it's OK but not paperbacks for...reasons.)  So I had to change it from "Feminization Bundle" to "Feminization Collection."  And then I changed the Kindle title and A+ content and everything to match.  Ugh.

I'm not really going to miss doing those stories.  It might seem weird, but I don't like feminization stories.  They're just boring to me.  I mean, a guy puts on girl clothes and maybe a wig...big whoop.  It just seems to limit things, especially in bed because if he's pretending he's a girl he can't use his thing, right?  So that kind of limits you to two orifices.  It's just not that interesting to me.  And the emotional stakes seem a lot lower.  I mean, he can literally just take this shit off whenever he wants--unless maybe he's being threatened by someone.  With a gender swap the person is usually stuck as a woman, maybe until they learn a lesson or get an antidote or whatever time period is up like the 24 Hour Gender Swap series; they can't just take off a wig and put on guy clothes and be the way they were.  So it wasn't all that fun for me.  Not that I think the stories are bad; I just don't think they're as much fun as the gender swap stories.

Anyway, back in 2014 it was enough just to put books out there.  I didn't create a newsletter or reader magnet for about a full year.  But in 2023, apparently it's not enough to just put books out there.  I would say it's probably that there are a lot more authors and maybe fewer readers.  Or readers who are just too swamped.

This all goes back to what I've said before about discoverability.  People talk about covers and keywords and categories and all that, but it doesn't really matter.  At least not at first.  Because the problem is Amazon's search engine, like all search engines, isn't going to put Kelly Counts's books at the top of the results if you search for transgender romance or feminization.  With literally thousands of other stories out there, it's just going to get lost in the shuffle.  (An unfortunate thing I realized about this name when I Googled it is most of the first page of results is about R. Kelly being convicted of however many counts of whatever.  Oops.)

Still one of the best ways to get people to read a book without spending a ton of money is to make the book free.  I got a bunch of downloads and a handful of ratings (none with words of course) when I made Spokesmodel free.  I was hoping people might buy more Kelly Counts books or at least sign up for the newsletter, but nope.  Probably because the kind of people who gulp down free books aren't the type to actually buy anything.  They're the type who go into a store and eat up the free samples and then leave without paying for anything.

Early in May, since I was working on a private commission and hadn't any new material for a few weeks, I decided to rebrand all of the Kelly Counts books.  So now they say, "Eric Filler Writing As Kelly Counts" like those Nora Roberts/JD Robb books.  I put an announcement on my blog and in the newsletter and updated the Planet 99 Publishing site to add those books.  And?

I got a few sales of the 5-in-one "collection" but not of the individual books.  So overall it was pretty much a big waste of time and effort.  Too bad because I mostly liked the stories even though they weren't really my thing.

Don't Leave Quality Control to the End User

 Back in the 70s there was the infamous Ford Pinto memo where executives basically said it was cheaper to settle a few wrongful death suits than to recall their shitty product.  You'd think companies might have learned something from the public outcry to that, but nah.  Companies, especially cheap Chinese manufacturers don't really seem to give a shit about quality and leave it up to consumers to find the flaws in their poor designs and manufacturing.

I think in one entry I talked about some really stupid things I got from Vine, like a watch where the hands would cover the digital display at the 45th minute of every hour or all through either 9 o'clock.  It was something so obvious I couldn't believe no designer realized the flaw.  Or an in-room air conditioner that creates a bunch of excess moisture you really need to drain every time you use it or it starts making a lot of noise--but they put the drain so low to the ground it's really hard to do without making a mess.  Because everyone has a floor drain handy, right?  And everyone wants to unhook the air conditioner to wheel it over to the floor drain, right?  Nope to both.  After trying to find a pan or dish that could fit under it, I found a solution:  diapers!  I got some diapers and incontinence pads from Amazon Vine and found putting one--or really just one half of a diaper--under the drain would soak up the moisture without much mess.  Still, if they had just put the drain an inch or so up, I wouldn't have to go to the trouble.

A few months ago I got this coffee mug that has a thing to stir your drink.  It's a magnetic pellet that looks like a vitamin capsule.  You put that in the bottom and then it'll mix stuff up.  Which does work.  But the obvious flaws were A) the mug is about the size of a 32oz cup but only holds about 12oz of liquid and B) they give you a flat lid instead of a sippy lid.  The latter makes it very difficult to drink on the road because you either have to A) keep taking off the lid and putting it on or B) not open it the whole trip or C) open it and every time you hit a bump (frequent on Michigan roads) your coffee sloshes all over.  I was already in a bad mood so I wound up getting so frustrated by the shitty design that I threw the fucking thing out the window.

Often ordering stuff from Amazon Vine feels like you're getting stuff from the Island of Misfit Toys.  There are dollar store-quality action figures and pens they charge people real brand prices.  There was a stuffed "banana duck" with so little stuffing that he couldn't stand; fortunately they had the foresight to put a zipper in back so I could use some stuffing I had in my closet.  There was a camping toilet with legs that wouldn't go on the proper way; you either have to put them on backwards so they won't lock in place or else the feet of the legs won't be flat on the ground to make your toilet wobbly.  A fan that's supposed to plug into the USB port of a car didn't actually work on my car's USB port; it does work if I plug it into an adapter for the 12V port--the former cigarette lighter.  Even then it wouldn't really work in my car because the dashboard is too high.  When I tried plugging it into portable chargers, it only worked with one--and only on the lowest speed.  But it does work pretty good plugged into my computer.  So that's something.  What I found out from the company is the thing is overpowered so a lot of older chargers and apparently the USB plug in my car don't have enough power to run it.  I got a new portable charger with more power (Tim Allen grunt) that mostly runs the thing fine.  Still, it's the kind of thing I wish someone would have mentioned.

Another example is I got an MP3 player that claimed to hold 48GB, which is good because my music collection on MP3 is somewhere around 37GB, so it's too big to put on a 32GB unit but 64GB leaves a lot of empty space.  When the thing comes, I find out that it might hold 48GB, buuuuut that's 16GB internally and 32GB in an external card.  Which is annoying then because I have to split my music between them instead of just putting it all internally or externally.  I checked and it does say that in the product description, but it's a few mind-numbingly poorly written bullet points down.  It'd be better to just say it's a 16GB expandable to whatever.

A few days after I gave that MP3 player a 3-star review, someone going by the name "Cynthia Nelson" started to harass me by email about taking down the review or changing it.  She even offered me $30--ha ha.  I kept refusing and saying that if Amazon found out I took a bribe I'd lose my account--maybe all of my accounts.  They kept at it and I finally said to fuck off.  Then they started over with the same boilerplate email they sent the first time.  At which point I said I was changing my review to 1-star and mentioning this harassment.  The weird thing is they had plenty of 4-star or higher reviews and the product wasn't even available to buy and my review was 3 stars so it wasn't really hurting them.  Why go to all this effort to try to get rid of it?  And I'm sure if I'd taken the review down they would have just ghosted me instead of paying me; I'm 99.9% sure Cynthia Nelson was not a real name.  I don't even know how these assholes get my Amazon email because I've removed it from my profile; maybe there's some Contact button for sellers to contact reviewers.

Then there was a particularly weird time when I ordered candles.  The listing said "romantic candles" but I didn't think much of that.  I mean most people consider candlelight romantic, right?  But when the package came there was a white box and inside were two smaller boxes for "bondage candles."  According to the box description they were meant to be used for S&M play.  But looking at the reviews, one woman who tried this--wisely just on her arm--got burned.  So what seems pretty obvious is the company was stuck with a bunch of "bondage candles" that couldn't be used for bondage so they decided to remarket them as regular candles.  Except they were too lazy to fully repackage them and just put a blank box over them.  Or maybe they did intend for people to use them that way and didn't give a crap that people could get burned--see the Ford memo.

At work one of the things that really irks me is when I get checks that shouldn't have even come to me.  A lot of the time it's that the person or business mailing them was supposed to send the payment to a sister company in Warren.  What happens is whoever is doing the accounting doesn't bother to check the paperwork they get from the courts to see where the payments go so they just send it to where they sent it before.  Then the payment gets tied up for weeks getting sent back and resent to the right people.  Or sometimes they actually put the Warren address and then I don't really know what they're thinking in sending it to Novi.  I mean, they're like 30-40 miles apart.

One time, before the pandemic even, I got a check from a company in San Jose, California to another company in Los Angeles.  Somehow this check mailed from California and going to California went 2500 miles east, through numerous stops along the way, for some reason got delivered to our office, and the person in the mailroom put it with our accounts receivable to end up on my desk.  In other words, no one looked at the damned thing until I did or else they would have realized there was no way it should have been given to me.

With most products now, the instructions they give you are almost worse than useless.  I'm not sure if they write them in AI or just write them in Mandarin and Google Translate them, but the English is so bad that often it's just gibberish.  Quite a few of them say "Warm Tip" instead of "Warning."  One said to use "dig soap" instead of "dish soap" and another kept saying "armyworm" to refer to its glue pad to catch bugs.  I always think to myself, "Couldn't they just pay someone $5 on Fiverr or somewhere like that to do a proper translation?  Would that really be so difficult?  At least have someone who knows English as a first language proofread it for you so it doesn't come out as gibberish.

But especially as AI grows, you can probably expect more stuff like that.  No one really looking at things or evaluating the designs or instructions or anything.  Just slap it together and ship it out and let the user find the flaws.  Which like with the Ford Pinto can be deadly.  But it's easier to deal with a few bad reviews or a lawsuit--especially if you're some fly-by-night company in China--than to spend the money to do things right.  

A lot of these silly Chinese companies lately will come after me if I post a bad review, like the one I mentioned above.  They're not mean so much as just really stupid.  They keep offering a "refund," which isn't possible for Vine products.  And when I tell them that they propose a replacement.  If the first one sucks, why would I want another?  Because usually it's not that these products are defective so much as just poorly designed and manufactured.  Anyway, the not-so-subtle ask is that if they give you a refund or replacement you'll change or delete your review, which is against the rules but if they don't directly say that it's not illegal.

Of course these problems also happen with writing.  You get people who think spellchecking a book is enough editing or don't even bother with that and slop out a "book" filled with typos and horrible formatting.  In a few cases that's me when I put out books like First Contact and Waking Prometheus from 1995-2000 that have comma splices and stuff that are too numerous to be fixed easily.  Though I did know about the problems; I was just too lazy to fix them.  Is that better?  No.

You should definitely not be so lazy that you don't take time to do a proper editing pass.  Or have someone do it for you if you don't really know spelling or grammar or anything like that.  It took Ford a while to recover its reputation and to some people it still hasn't.  For an author, especially a new one, getting a bunch of bad reviews or ratings because you didn't bother to fix obvious problems may not be something you can recover from.

What Kind of Collector Are You?

 Back on the X entry of this year's A to Z "Challenge," CD Gallant-King remarked:

You would know better than I, but I don't understand how they decide to make which figures. Like Amanda Waller, while a major characater, I guess wouldn't be a very INTERESTING figure. Yet that made that infamous "Bob the Goon" figure from the original Batman movie...

And it got me thinking.  First, I wish I really did know how they choose what figures to make.  But more than that, I think there are a few factors that go into it.

The most obvious one when you have something like DC, Marvel, or Star Wars is:  What new movies/shows are coming out?  Because usually if there's a new movie, you're going to want to try to take advantage of it with some new figures from that.  So with the Flash movie coming out, McFarlane of course made a few figures and vehicles from the movie:

That's the most obvious reason, but to dig deeper, I think collectors generally have a couple of different philosophies on what they buy.

There are those who collect mostly one character or maybe just a few characters, but they want basically everything of that character.  So you might have someone who really loves Batman and wants every single Batman McFarlane can pump out--which is a lot.  Or every Deadpool Hasbro can come out with.  Or every Darth Vader Hasbro can make.  Or every Optimus Prime or Starscream or Megatron Hasbro can make.

Then there are people like me who are more interested in collecting breadth.  By which I mean, I like to have lots of different characters.  I get one Superman I like and that's enough.  Same for Batman, Deadpool, Wolverine, etc.  I don't fixate on just one character, not even favorites like Azrael or Batgirl.  Getting back to CD's comment, I would absolutely love an Amanda Waller figure or especially a Bob the Joker's Goon figure.  And for me, the wackier they are, the neater it is to have a figure of them.  I would be thrilled if McFarlane came out with Kite Man or Condiment Man or some of the weirder ones like that.  But if you're the sort who's more into Batman, you probably wouldn't be.

Adding to that is another huge factor:  Money, ca-ching!  In Empires & Puzzles, some people talk about "whales," ie the people who can spend hundreds a day on the game.  Then there are poor-ass bitches like me who can't afford $2 on the game.  With action figures you have the same thing.  Some people have the money (and space) to get every single thing.  Others, like me, have to be choosier.  So I can pass on another Batfleck figure or Flash figure.  But the Keaton Batman or the Supergirl one that haven't been made before are much more interesting to me.

But everyone is different, so if you collect anything, what's your philosophy?  That can apply to action figures, comics, or even regular books.